Do not understand how loop is determining how many asterisks to print

I am a beginner at learning Java. I have stumbled upon a problem that I can not figure out. How is the loop in the code determining how many asterisk to print out. I keep looking at this part of the code..

asterisk < myArray[counter]

Could someone please explain in the simplest of terms how this works, because every time I think of the counter, I see it as nothing but the index that it is pointing to at that time in the loop.